Wednesday, November 11, 2009
From EFF’s Secret Files: Anatomy of a Bogus Subpoena
Can the U.S. government secretly subpoena the IP address of every visitor to a political website? No, but that didn’t stop it from trying.
Can the U.S. government secretly subpoena the IP address of every visitor to a political website? No, but that didn’t stop it from trying.
Bill Clinton sent only two email messages as president and has yet to pick up the habit. George W. Bush ceased using email in January 2001 but has said he’s looking forward to emailing “my buddies” after leaving Washington, D.C. Barack Obama, though, is a serious email addict.
If you thought that federal regulators were upset at Comcast’s throttling of BitTorrent, wait until they start scrutinizing what wireless providers are doing.
By choosing Joe Biden as their vice presidential candidate, the Democrats have selected a politician with a mixed record on technology who has spent most of his Senate career allied with the FBI and copyright holders, who ranks toward the bottom of CNET’s Technology Voters’ Guide, and whose anti-privacy legislation was actually responsible for the [...]
New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo announced on Tuesday that Verizon Communications, Time Warner Cable and Sprint would “shut down major sources of online child pornography.” What Cuomo didn’t say is that his agreement with broadband providers means that they will broadly curb customers’ access to Usenet–the venerable pre-Web home of some 100,000 discussion groups, only a handful of which contain illegal material.
Online advertising has ballooned into a roughly $45 billion-a-year business, to the benefit of Google, Yahoo, ad networks and innumerable specialty and hobbyist Web sites. One corner of this ecosystem that hasn’t managed to cash in on advertising is, by some measurements, the largest: broadband providers. So it may have been inevitable that they would seek additional revenue by monitoring their customers’ online activities and creating behavioral profiles that could yield hyper-relevant ads.
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